Playing a folder

A folder plays as a set: the pictures, videos and slides in it, one after the other, behind the words, on the program in place of verses and songs, or over whatever is live as an overlay. A deck plays the same way, slide by slide, but only behind the words or on the program. Announcements before the service, sponsor logos in a corner, camp photos behind the words: each is a folder of its own.

What plays behind the words lives in a folder called Backgrounds. Every install starts with one, and a Backdrops folder inside it holds the generated backgrounds the app ships with.

Fill a folder

Open Library, pick a folder, and it shows as tiles. Fill it three ways:

• Drag pictures or videos in, or Create → Add files.
• Create → New backdrop: a generated background. Pick a preset, set its palette (ground, mid, highlight) and adjust its parameters.
• Move to folder on anything already in the library, a slide too: a countdown or a welcome card plays in the set like a picture.

Make a folder per season or per kind of service: each folder is a set. Songs, decks and folders inside it are left out of it; a deck is a set of its own.

Play it

A folder’s menu, in the tree or on its tile, has Show now, Show as background and Show as overlay, for the ones it holds something for. Each starts at the first item. A deck’s menu has only the first two: a deck is a presentation, and never goes over the wall.

Showing one item from a tile’s menu plays its folder from there: Next in the dock goes on to the item after it. Under Backgrounds, Show as background comes first. Enter or a double-click only opens an item full size: nothing goes on a screen until you pick Show.

A picture or video in the order of service is shown on its own, so Next there goes on to the service’s next item.

Hold

The clock on a tile sets how many seconds it stays before the next item comes up, and a deck’s slides each have a Hold in the deck editor. With no hold:

• behind the words and over them, a picture or slide moves on after 8 seconds;
• behind the words, a video plays to its end, and plays again when there is nothing after it;
• on the program, everything waits for you, and a video plays once;
• a backdrop stays until you move on.

A hold belongs to the item, so a picture held 20 seconds moves on after 20 seconds wherever it plays.

The dock

Each layer’s bar has Previous and Next, Pause, which holds the countdown where it is and a video on its frame, Shuffle and Loop. Loop goes back to the start after the last item, and Shuffle takes them in a random order. Both are kept with the folder or the deck, so a pre-service loop set up once plays the same way next week, on every computer. At the top of the library they last until the app closes. Click the name in a bar to go back to what is playing.

The folder plays in the order its tiles are in, which is by name: to play one earlier, name it so.

From a phone

On the web app’s Live page, the overlay and the background each have the same controls. A folder’s menu in the library plays it on any layer of the computer you picked, and a deck’s on the program or behind the words.

With the cloud

Folders sync with the rest of your library. A video is downloaded to a second computer only once you pin it, or its folder, on that computer.